Healthline does it again. They put up a website in 2014 entitled ‘29 Things Only a Person Who’s Quitting Smoking Would Understand’. Apart from the crudity and smugness of the writing, it’s another example of everything that’s wrong with the orthodox approach to the smoking problem. For a start, the very idea of ‘quitting smoking’ […]
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Why is this allowed? As an example of the continuing official confusion in about smoking/vaping, here is a statement (9 Dec 2016) by Cancer research UK: Harm reduction is a type of public health policy that aims to reduce the harmful consequences of substances, or actions, without necessarily reducing or eliminating the use itself. For […]
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Why bother with all this? The doughty online publication, ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News, on 9 June 2017 carried a warning headline: ‘Safety advice given after e-cigarette fire’. A woman called Leanne Williams had a potentially serious problem with an ‘88 Vape’ brand e-cigarette apparatus. This is how 88 Vape advertises these […]
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Is smoking harmful, or isn’t it? Or is it, perhaps, good for you? In particular, the weighty question needs to be considered: is there any connection between passive smoking (breathing cigarette smoke-polluted air produced by other smokers) and dementia? A headline in an online publication called Care Appointments says: ‘[The University of] Wolverhampton secure (sic) […]
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Here is an interesting piece of news reported in the online Health News (Reuters Health) on 26 May 2017. The headline is the alarming statement: ‘Heat-not-burn cigarettes still release cancer-causing chemicals.’ Shock, horror. This is according to an investigation by Dr Reto Auer and colleagues of the University of Bern, Switzerland. The heat-not-burn type of […]
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A young girl ties tobacco leaves onto sticks to prepare them for curing The desperate need to deal with the smoking problem by outlawing tobacco could not be more plainly made than in the six bulleted points of ASH’s (Action on Smoking and Health’s) online Daily News of 30 May 2017. Here they are: Tobacco […]
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The scholarly journal with the curious name of Tobacco Control, on the cover of the May 2017 issue shows a picture of an inflated balloon with a map of the world on it about to be burst by a lighted cigarette. The wording is ‘Tobacco threatens us all’ and ‘Say No to Tobacco’, among other […]
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Here is a fantastic piece of news about an undercover investigation by the Royal Society of Public Health, reported in April 2017. They found that nine out of ten retailers of e-cigarettes ‘are turning a blind eye to their use by non-smokers, and effectively pushing them as a lifestyle product.’ Very wicked! What are vape […]
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The UK government is about to introduce legislation to require cigarettes to be sold in what is called standardised packaging. They claim this will discourage children from starting to smoke. Fine, but it’s rather a roundabout way of going about it. They’re saying, in effect, ‘Don’t buy this, it’s dangerous.’ Or are they trying to […]
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My attention was drawn recently to a badly written ‘Ezine’ article from 2010 by the well-named so-called expert author Hayden Eck with the confusing title ‘Do Not Give Up – Smoking Cessation is Possible’. At first glance it looks as if he’s telling you not to give up smoking, but he means you should not […]
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Is this a statement or a question? In either case it’s a strange idea. Where does the how come into stopping doing something? If people want to stop smoking why don’t they just stop? Why does it seem to be so difficult? Many methods, ways, techniques, systems, or ‘tools’ for smoking cessation are on offer […]
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The UK Ecig Store likes to make a splash: they boast of ‘Over 600 e-cigarette flavours’! So much for e-cigarette regulation in Britain. If this sort of advertising is not to entice young people to ‘vape’ and get hooked on it I don’t know what is. Now let’s go to the small print at the […]
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If you were new to the piano and wanted to play Bach’s C major prelude you would need to practise. (There are YouTube videos showing how to do this.) But if you decided to give up learning this wonderful piece, which would be a pity, all you would have to do is close the piano […]
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There was an interesting article two days ago in the online Manawatu Standard titled: ‘Government legalises e-cigarettes in effort to make New Zealand smokefree by 2025.’ Why 2025? Because this is a nice round figure? Why not sooner, say, 2019? Apart from the date by which the New Zealand government is trying to achieve this […]
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Fumatul ucide is Spanish for smoking kills In my tireless efforts to bring you the low-down on the tricks of the tobacco trade let me tell you about this little gem I came across recently from British American Tobacco (BAT): http://www.bat.com/group/sites/UK__9D9KCY.nsf/vwPagesWebLive/DO8GSFQT Under the page header the eye is drawn to the large print: ‘Our Guiding […]
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How can Nic-‘otine’-andro Durante face himself in the mirror each morning? Let me put it another way. What are 10,000 deaths a year in the UK worth? To work this out we need to remember that one of the warning labels appearing on cigarette packs amusingly states ‘Smoking kills’. More precisely, smoking kills about 100,000 […]
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The title is a quotation from Groucho Marx. Keeping this in mind, let’s look at the website of Japan Tobacco International (JTI), in particular the section headed ‘Our six core principles’. (The word ‘core’ is redundant.) The hypocrisy from start to finish is breathtaking. The very idea of a tobacco company declaring it has any […]
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German industrial cigarette machine – makes 10,000 cigarettes a minute There are some individuals and organisations that have found a way to deal with awkward questions: ignore them! Recently I cast my critical eye at the website of the venerable cigarette manufacturing company, Japan Tobacco International (JTI). In their ‘About tobacco’ section we find the […]
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Tobacco is not an illegal substance yet the government is persecuting a minority. I think that’s a disgrace in a social democracy. Sir Ronald Harwood Playwright and screenwriter There is in Britain a smokers’ rights group called Forest (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco). The name tells you a lot. But are […]
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Smoking used to have a certain cool image. When Sherlock Holmes had a difficult problem to solve he would smoke shag tobacco in his pipe and think it through. He also used cocaine and morphine to escape from ‘the dull routine of existence’ as he put it.
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Now here’s something for smokers to ponder. The popular online medical information website, healthline.com, has a feature on ‘The best quit smoking apps’ for 2016.
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In a recent edition of The British Medical Journal (11 February 2017, p 232), that doughty source of the latest medico-political developments, there is a blog by a Dr Mary Black about the problem of smoking in hospitals, titled ‘Is it time we stopped colluding with smokers?’ I felt moved to send a response; it […]
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I hope the copywriters of Public Health England’s ‘Smokefree’ campaign will forgive me for my satirical review of their efforts which I put in a chapter of my book, Smoking is a Psychological Problem. At least they were trying, however misguidedly, to help smokers quit. Now, the other day I wished to refresh my memory […]
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You can’t say they’re not trying. Here’s news of a campaign by an organisation with the pleasant name of Fresh, announced in the online News Guardian (24 February 2017), to try to get smokers to quit. Well, so they should, if they know what’s good for them. Readers are reminded that cutting down on smoking […]
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Is this what we want to see? Among those involved in public health who see it as their task to ‘control’ tobacco by supporting measures to ‘drive down smoking rates,’ as they put it, a new refrain has arisen that has almost become a mantra: e-cigarettes are 95 per cent safer than smoking tobacco! Some […]
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What’s this? A smoking doctor? No, a vaping doctor! He has the unusual name of Attila Danko, which seems to be of Eastern European provenance, possibly Hungarian, and I hope he will forgive me for saying that this perhaps explains his passing resemblance to the actor Christopher Lee in his role as Dracula from next […]
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Here’s what we’ve all been waiting for! From the highly esteemed WebMD and identified as their ‘top pick’, you are invited to ‘Use This Plan to Stop Smoking’ – that is, if you’re a smoker looking for advice on how to quit. Let’s click on the link and see. There’s a set of questions. These […]
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Gentle reader, forgive my cynicism, but here we have another example of what might be called ‘The Hard Way to Quit Smoking’, this time from the website of New York City Government. I’ve put selected quotes in italics and added comments that an imaginary smoker might make as he or she reads through the site. […]
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I have just come across an interesting presentation by one Maciej L Goniewicz, PhD, who works at the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit of Queen Mary University of London and the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies. So he should know what he’s talking about. Oh, and he receives research funding from Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company […]
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Here’s an amazing news story. No, it’s not the Flat Earth News, but comes from the hallowed pages of The Scottish Sun. (Online edition, 25 January 2017.) First, the surprising headline: GPs telling smokers how soon they will die ‘makes them three times more likely to quit’. Now hang on a minute. How is it […]
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